They uprooted their lives and moved 6,000 miles from home to watch a torn ligament heal. They are not doctors or scientists but even if they were, they would probably still only get second-hand updates about the ligament from people with a vested interest in protecting privacy. They follow the ligament, and the man attached to it, around a country where they do not speak the language. And for the most part, just like their American counterparts, they stand around and wait, getting paid to watch stadium grass grow for a living.

Advertisement

The Japanese sports media assigned to cover Shohei Ohtani will finally have something new to write about Tuesday, as the Angels’ two-way phenom makes his season debut as their designated hitter in Detroit. After tearing his ulnar collateral ligament last year and undergoing Tommy John surgery in October, the reigning American League Rookie of the Year, who hit 22 home runs and struck out 63 batters in 51 innings, is finally back. Hallelujah. Well, half of him is back. The Angels have decided that, while Ohtani’s ligament is sound enough for him to resume hitting, he will not pitch again until 2020.

But that’s just fine for the Japanese writers and camera crews who have been charged with filing updates to newspapers and television stations every single day since the beginning of spring training, even when the only news was that there was no news.

Fans who think baseball games are long might be shocked to learn that journalists who cover the games arrive between four to five hours before first pitch and stay for an hour or two afterward. Typically, home clubhouses are open to the media 3½ hours prior to the game’s start and are closed when batting practice begins about a half hour later. During those 30 minutes of media availability, writers stand (they’re not allowed to sit) amid the lockers and look for players to interview. Each team’s stadium facilities get fancier every year, meaning most players spend the pregame availability hiding in weight rooms, batting cages, training rooms, dining areas and even quiet meditation rooms which the press can’t enter. And the two or three players who do hang out at their lockers are usually on their phones scrolling through Twitter and Instagram or texting.

As the difference between journalists’ salaries and athletes’ salaries grows wider each year, so does the gulf between anything the two sides have in common. Finding something to write about every day is difficult even when you’re not following around a player who is injured.

Advertisement

None of the few dozen Japanese media members I spoke to for this story wanted me to use their names. It wasn’t because they said anything bad about Ohtani, or anyone else for that matter. It was because they are uncomfortable drawing attention to themselves.

Some of them have lived in the United States for decades and have covered every countryman from Hideo Nomo to Ichiro to Hideki Matsui to the 25th guy on the roster of the worst team in Major League Baseball. The male/female split is more even than among their American counterparts. Some are on month-to-month apartment leases in Irvine and El Segundo and shuttle between covering Ohtani at Angels home games and reporting on Kenta Maeda at Dodger Stadium. Many live in New York and Seattle and spend the entire season in hotels. They are stationed at Doubletrees or Courtyard Marriotts when the Angels are in Anaheim, and they check out and haul their belongings with them when the club heads out on road trips. (Unlike the man they are chasing, they fly commercial). One journalist followed Ohtani for years while he played in Japan, and then followed him here to the States when he debuted with the Angels a year ago.

But for all their days, weeks and months studying Ohtani, they do not seem to know him any better than I do. And I’ve only met the man once. Part of that is the nature of their subject.

Ohtani is as unknowable as his teammate Mike Trout, a man who is always affable and respectful to media without ever saying anything worth writing down. It is partly by design, as the Angels limit Ohtani’s talks with the press to twice a week and about 15 minutes each. It is understandable given the logistics of trying to streamline information to dozens of journalists who are terrified of missing one scrap of precious intel, but it also means every reporter gets the exact same thing, which turns them into glorified stenographers.

Perhaps the biggest reason they do not know Ohtani well is they don’t feel they can ask him anything personal. An unspoken rule among Japanese sports media is that to do their job well, they will always stick to sports. During spring training, one of them asked me to ask Ohtani if he had a girlfriend, and the others laughed. Ohtani is an exceptional ballplayer who is also tall and handsome, and this makes him somewhat of a rockstar back home. It felt a little like cool sixth-graders trying to convince a gullible kindergartner to stick a gumball up her nose. I considered asking the question for them, until they told me they wouldn’t be able to report the answer anyway, because it was too invasive of his privacy. We settled on a question about what Ohtani was going to do for fun on the Angels’ off day the following day.

Advertisement

When Ohtani had his availability that day at Tempe Diablo Stadium, the American reporters clustered in one scrum while the Japanese reporters gathered five feet away. Ohtani first answered questions from the English-speaking media, including mine, to which he, true to form, replied: “No plans as of yet but I’ll try to figure something out.” Another American reporter asked him about the cowboy boots his teammate Cody Allen wanted him to get, while another asked if he had gone to the escape-room outing with the team’s relievers the night before. When he was done laughing and saying very little (no on the cowboy boots, no on the escape room), he walked over to the Japanese side and answered questions that were strictly about MLB rule changes affecting two-way players and about his rehabilitation process.

While the Japanese media were in earshot of the American press session, a few told me later that they don’t feel they can use anything Ohtani tells the English-speaking media because he didn’t say it directly to them. It’s not a mistrust thing so much as an etiquette thing. If he had told the American media, for instance, that he was planning on spending his off day at a rodeo wearing Cody Allen’s cowboy boots, they probably would not have written it unless they had a chance to ask him about it themselves. And his next media availability would not happen for days.

Following a man who you do not know around the world and who only talks to you for 10 to 15 minutes a few days a week presents something of a logistical nightmare. During spring training, camera crews arrived to the ballpark every day around 7:30 a.m. and set up near the players’ parking lot to shoot video of Ohtani arriving and walking 20 feet from his car to the stadium door where the players enter. He always arrived with his translator, Ippei Mizuhara, who drives him to the stadium. (None of the Japanese media are sure if Ohtani has an American driver’s license yet, and they do not ask him.)

Mizuhara used to work with Ohtani’s old team in Japan, the Nippon Ham Fighters, translating Japanese for American players. He is a smart, easygoing guy who does not get flustered, a quality that has been a tremendous asset to Ohtani so far. Seven years ago at the introductory press conference of then-Oakland A’s pitcher Hiroyuki Nakajima, the interpreter relayed that Nakajima said his new general manager, Billy Beane, was “extremely sexy and cool,” which made for a tremendous quote but was probably not exactly what Nakajima meant. So far, Ohtani (via Mizuhara) has not called any of his employers sexy.

After Ohtani arrived at Tempe Diablo Stadium each day in spring training, the Japanese media sent the video back to their news desks across the Pacific, and they remained in their places until they captured his exit from the field. His departure can happen anywhere between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. They never got a heads-up when it would be, and they did not leave until he walked out.

When Ohtani’s media session ended that day, the group I was with retreated to the press box to eat lunch of Okayo-don, a delicious chicken and egg dish that roughly translates to “parent-child bowl” that they packed themselves. Since they were stationed in Tempe for weeks, a reporter from New York shipped two rice cookers to the hotel where most of them were staying, and many of them took turns cooking the rice they bought from a local Korean market. But it’s not as though they don’t eat American food. They can’t exactly haul rice cookers through airports all season long without also winding up on the injured list.

When Ohtani left spring training, the Japanese media followed him back to Anaheim. And for the first six weeks of the season, they showed up to Angel Stadium of Anaheim every day waiting for information like “he took X number of swings in the cage today” and “he played catch for X number of minutes.” When the Angels seemed to hint that Ohtani would return to the lineup on the first road trip in May, I looked at the schedule and gasped. The team was leaving Anaheim for a two-game tilt with the Astros in Monterrey, Mexico, before flying to Detroit, then Baltimore, then back to Minneapolis — a brutal two-week stretch that would see them zigzag some 8,000 miles across two countries. And because the Angels could not (or declined to) say for sure which specific day he would return, that meant the Japanese press had to be there for all of it, just in case. (A few days before the series in Monterrey, the media was mercifully told Ohtani would not be playing, so there was no reason for anyone on the Ohtani beat to travel to Mexico.)

Advertisement

Though the Angels tweeted Monday that Ohtani would be making the trip to Detroit, they still cautioned that a final decision on his activation from the injured list would be made Tuesday after warmups. Perhaps they were worried he might hurt himself on the plane ride. Finally, at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, the Angels posted their lineup for the series opener, with Ohtani batting third. Approximately 75 to 80 Japanese media members were in attendance, according to Chad Crunk, the Tigers’ director of media relations.

After months of waiting, the Angels will add one of their most potent bats to revive an anemic offense that is 20th in MLB in runs scored. And the men and women who follow him daily will at last have something tangible to fill their notebooks and deliver to a rapt public of millions in Japan. Ohtani’s two-way success makes him the most exciting player in the game today. If there is anyone worth following around 6,000 miles away from home, it’s him.

So welcome back, Shohei Ohtani. Baseball has missed you. Especially a Japanese media corps waiting on every one of your words and moves.

Top photo of Shohei Ohtani: Mark J. Rebilas / USA TODAY Sports

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57mG9tcmthZH9xfZhoZ25nYGx8tLHAq5qhoZ6ceqe70WaqoaeYmrZuu8etmKehXZ67tLXDnmStoJVit6K8wKecrJ1dorKltcCsZJ2ZmaHGbrPRoqWdZw%3D%3D